Saturday, June 24, 2017

Life in Piecewise Linear Form/ACM Awards

I liked the deep learning panel pitting the thinkers -- Stuart Russell, Michael Jordan and others -- against/with the doers like Ilya Sutskever. The panel had some zingers like Stuart's reference to the Graduate Student Descent method. The panel more or less agreed on the strengths of deep learning --- power of learning circuits as concepts, throwing lot of computing power etc -- and their challenges -- thinking, reasoning. Judea kept pushing the panel to look at limitations of deep learning, "if I added another layer, I still can not do.... what?"

Joan Feigenbaum gave a powerful introduction to privacy vs security conundrum and had a superb panel that debated the issues in a nuanced way Crypto and Security people tend to do when confronted with the intersection of their work with social, policy and human issues. The panel was chock full of examples of "security holes" that are mainly human failings.

These meetings give me a chance to see people of course, but also see several lines of research and how far they have stretched, they need to stretch.